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Gizmo Takes On Skype

July 01, 2005

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July 02, 2005

Gizmo Takes On Skype

Rob Hof

Michael Robertson seems to enjoy trying to shake up the powers that be, as he did in music with MP3.com and in computer software with Lindows (now Linspire). Now, he has jumped into the surging field of Internet telephony with Gizmo, the working name for a voice-over-Internet protocol program from his latest venture, SIPphone. Robertson, naturally, thinks the more open nature of Gizmo will win over millions of people who have been using Skype, the runaway hit in free Internet telephony. Gizmo uses the open Session Initiation Protocol vs. Skype's proprietary technology.

With 41 million users, up to 3 million making calls at any one time, and some promising revenue opportunities such as the ability to call regular phones, Skype clearly isn't hurting yet. But Gizmo's challenge just goes to show that these days, more than ever, there's a vanishingly brief window of opportunity for upstarts--especially when all these new technologies help us users get together to keep companies honest.

06:26 PM

Innovation, Social Software, VOIP, Web 2.0

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Tracked on August 11, 2005 07:30 AM

May have to give this a try. I prefer open standards-based solutions and Skype always made me nervous as the developers were of Kazaa fame and that turned into a spyware/adware popup-generating mess. This should also be of interest to interview type podcasters as you can record conversations without jumping through hoops (supposedly).

Posted by: PXLated at July 2, 2005 08:33 PM

I'm a podcaster and I just tried out the recording ability of Gizmo with another podcaster. Read about it here:

http://myvogonpoetry.com/wp/index.php?p=78

brian

Posted by: Brian P at July 3, 2005 03:42 AM

Took a good look around the site, and noticed a lack of mention of two things - Encryption, and Source Code.

There are already plenty of SIP solutions out there - I fail to see why one more closed source, non-encryption SIP phone is worthy of mention. Gizmo appears to offer nothing that Free World Dialup or indeed the SIP client built into the Yahoo client doesn't.